Why is there no splitBy in the list module?

[Christian Maeder]

Simon Marlow schrieb:
> Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> 
>> Hacking up your own custom split (or a tokens/splitOnGlue) must be one
>> of the most common questions from beginners on the irc channel.
>>
>> Anyone rememeber what the result of the "let's get split into the base
>> library" movement's work was?
> 
> ISTR there wasn't a concensus, so nothing happened.  Which is silly,
> really - I agree we should definitely have a Data.List.split.
> 

Maybe someone can extract a result from the old discussion about
"Prelude function suggestions"

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/1684/focus=1684

Cheers Christian

Our current (special) version is:

{- |
  A function inspired by the perl function split. A list is splitted
  on a seperator element in smaller non-empty lists.
  The seperator element is dropped from the resulting list.
-}
splitOn :: Eq a => a -- ^ seperator
        -> [a] -- ^ list to split
        -> [[a]]
splitOn x xs = let (l, r) = break (==x) xs in
    (if null l then [] else [l]) ++ (if null r then [] else splitOn x $
tail r)